It is impossible to overestimate the significance of architecture that surrounds us when we grow up in the shaping of our emotional intelligence and our intellectual makeup in general. The reason hides in the fact that, unlike the beauty of nature, which makes us feel an infinitely small and therefore kind of unimportant element of creation, the beauty of art, especially architecture due to its magnitude and impressiveness, on the contrary, boosts our self-esteem by implying that it has actually been created by our fellow human beings and really making us stop and think about what we ourselves may be capable of. In object oriented terms it let us experience first-hand what “belongs to” is about on an emotional level (@@the_greatest_people_ever_lived « self, if you will).
You’ve probably heard the expression “like your life depends on it”. The interesting thing is that if you double-click this expression, you’ll find a blueprint for learning virtually anything you want, perhaps with some limitations concerning time and complexity.
The closing chapter of Georgy Martynov’s novel “Guest from the abyss” begins with the words “Man and his time are inseparable”. The idea of inseparability of man and his time seems to be the most foundational underlying topic of all his work, so foundational in fact, that conveying this message to the mankind may even have been the very reason he wrote his books in the first place. The only reason that comes to my mind why his books haven’t been translated into e.g. English (at least not to my knowledge) is the fact that the genre chosen by him was socialist realism, the only available genre in the USSR in 1951 when he began to work on his novel, so it wasn’t really his choice.